Focus shifts from community togetherness and wellbeing to money and finance

Since the government announced 'bounce back' from the Covid-19 pandemic in its vaccination campaign, with boosters and 'Building Back Better Together', things are right now very different from what we had perhaps hoped for or envisaged. I had imagined more effective working practices, less wasted travel and fewer CO2 emissions, more of a wellbeing focus, working to bring together the community to heal the 'lockdown generation' of children, parents and adults alike.

Indeed, some of the benefits of learning from the pandemic are being retained through things like maintaining agile working practices and embracing technology. Yet sadly, it feels to me that the key focus has shifted from community togetherness and wellbeing to a focus on finances, money and profit over people and communities for various global, but also political reasons. This is evident in a plethora of ways: from talk of fuel poverty being the norm to rising costs not meeting wage rises and now financial packages to garner public support and political power, yet likely to lead to huge sums of tax-payer debt.

I align myself with the community psychology movement having previously worked for over a decade co-creating wellbeing and advocacy projects, delivering services and campaigning with and for people who have been traditionally marginalised in society. These include children in care, care leavers, minoritised ethnic groups and refugees and asylum seekers, and service users of mental ill health projects.

In my recent academic work, I have had the privilege of talking to older women in the workplace and exploring in depth how to support older women's wellbeing at work, based on their views and experiences of working longer, often through necessity.

"State pension is all I get. Well, I couldn't live on that.

"Financially I need to carry on working because a few years ago, we bought the house that mum's in now for our retirement but she's still in it …so I have to keep working…"

This illustrates the link between the recent harmonisation of the state pension age in the UK for men and women (DWP, 2016), and its negative impact on older women. Older women are often forced to work for longer in lower paid and part-time roles and have more career breaks over their life course compared to men.

Exploring such inequalities in society has given me a wealth of experience to reflect on and delve into on my academic journey with students at the University of Salford. This will hopefully give them a sense of what is possible, in respect of awareness-raising and social change in providing practical, evidence-based actions to support workplace wellbeing for example, as well as thinking about applications of psychology in politics and society.

There is much more of an urgent need now for psychologists to work directly with the community in reshaping what could be described as a degenerative political landscape, compared to when I started my journey on the psychology and community psychology pathway back in 2003, when the war in Iraq was a cause for shame in British politics.

The discontent and shame are now closer to home.  Right now, in the United Kingdom of October 2022, we see not only oppression of marginalised and disadvantaged groups, but an oppression of the general population created by protection of profit over people. 

Justice, equality and empowerment, community capital and strength and growth, change and diversity are the driving values that community psychologists stand for and I have stood for since embarking on my journey through psychology. Yet, we have an NHS at breaking point, ambulances queuing outside hospitals and a general sense of hopelessness over the rising cost of living.

Organisations galvanising the discontent with the costs of living are now gathering momentum and turning to action, e.g. Don't Pay UK: https://dontpay.uk/ and Enough is Enough https://wesayenough.co.uk/.  General strikes are threatened and we have striking rail staff, postal workers and barristers, with more industrial action on the horizon.

Furthermore, even without the upcoming winter and spiralling fuel costs forcing the poorest in our society to have to choose between heating their home and eating, excess deaths are rising. In fact, in August 2022 excess deaths were 10 per cent up from the five-year average in England, with cited causes including NHS delays and ambulance waiting times (Hussain, 2022) and rising levels of social inequality (Bradshaw and Keung, 2022).

This is not levelling up and I can hear the campaign trail calling... Psychology and psychologists now have a responsibility to be political and stand up for social justice in the UK.

References:

Bradshaw, J. and Keung, A. (2022). Estimates of Fuel Poverty in January. Available: https://www.york.ac.uk/news-and-events/news/2022/research/fuel-poverty-uk/

Hussain, Z. (2022). UK health officials analyse recent rise in excess deaths

BMJ, 378 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.o2085

Recent publication:

Edge, C., Coffey, M., Cook, P., & Weinberg, A. (2021). Barriers and facilitators to extended working life: A focus on a predominately female ageing workforce. Ageing and Society, 41(12), 2867-2887. doi:10.1017/S0144686X2000063X.

Available here: https://t.co/yYezFmtTde

[email protected]

Article from the Political Psychology Section Autumn 2022 Bulletin